The rise and fall of FIFA’s once-brilliant World Cup documentaries | OneFootball

The week leading up to the World Cup is always special.

You’ve combed through World Soccer magazine’s reliably comprehensive preview issue. Ecuador are your dark horses, and that teenage Japanese right-back is going to be the breakout star of the tournament – just you wait.

Your wallchart is on the fridge, knockoff Uzbekistan shirt from DHgate is en route, and long dormant stag WhatsApp groups have sprung back to life with shoddily arranged sweepstakes.

You’re going to have to be more discerning with your podcast choices as the world’s most oversaturated market goes daily. None of it is essential. All of it feels completely necessary.

The anticipation might actually be actually be better than the tournament itself, where you’re left questioning your life choices after setting your alarm at 04:55 to sit through Austria 0-0 Jordan.

No pre-World Cup ritual is complete without watching a few of FIFA’s legendary World Cup documentaries. They serve as a timely reminder that as nation states build billion-pound squads, this will always be the very pinnacle of the sport. Brushing up on your football history will get you itching to see which of today’s stars will write the next chapter.

If you’re new to the series, we thoroughly recommend starting with ‘Hero: The Official Film of the 1986 FIFA World Cup’ – available in full on YouTube (below), or – like every other instalment of the long-running series, totally free via FIFA+ on DAZN.

Directed by English filmmaker Tony Maylam, whose eclectic CV includes slasher cult classic The Burning, early 90s dystopian buddy cop caper Split Second and a Genesis concert film, it’s an outstanding piece of cinematic craftsmanship.

What elevates the documentary is its refusal to settle for anything ordinary. Maylam understands that the story of a World Cup is often found away from the ball, in the emotional debris that surround each defining moment; the nervous glances, the clenched fists, the thousand-yard stares.

From a tactical perspective, Hero is almost entirely uninterested in explaining how football works. The cameras rarely concern themselves with shape or structure. You’ve got the wide-lens broadcast footage for that, and – credit where it’s due – FIFA+ also has you well served on that front. Instead, they focus on individual battles, personal reactions and unbearable moments of tension.

If any indie cinema curators were planning on the perfect World Cup hype-inducing double bill, they couldn’t do better than pairing Hero with Asif Kapadia’s superb 2019 Diego Maradona documentary. An intimate portrait of Maradona as a human being alongside astonishing footage that captures what a force of nature he was on the pitch.

Besides actually watching the full games themselves, you will not find a better document of the out-of-this-world levels Maradona reached that sweltering summer in Mexico.

If your love of football pre-dates the dawn of xG and counterpressing strategies, the close-up footage of El Diego will be your holy grail. As if an auteur like Terrence Malick was sitting pitchside to capture the most god-like levels reached by any footballer.

Better yet, it’s guided by the unmistakable voice of Michael Caine and accompanied by a richly layered synth score you’d expect of Rick Wakeman.

It could not belong to any other decade. Which is exactly what makes it so great.

Adam Hurrey, a one-time Planet Football contributor, has written the definitive take on the depressing visual ubiquity of modern World Cups for The Athletic: “The 20-year plateau of the FIFA World Cup™ aesthetic (or why World Cups all now look the same)”.

It’s for this reason that the last three or four editions of FIFA’s documentary series aren’t really worth watching. An extension of FIFA’s dead-eyed quest to turn every World Cup into a kind of liminal corporate Backrooms, every ounce of local culture and character bulldozed to serve at the altar of Visa and Aramco.

The newer documentaries are the film equivalent of the kind of vapid guff regularly uttered by Gianni Infantino:

“This is not a ball. This is a magic object that transforms children, or adults, into happy children or happy adults,” the FIFA president told a presumably very bored audience at a recent ‘World Football Day’ event.

“As soon as you touch the ball, you start smiling. You start being happy. You start enjoying. You start playing.”

Word salad so profoundly meaningless it could’ve been in the opening monologue of their 2018 or 2022 documentaries.

It’s the sort of shallow line that could only be delivered by Infantino, who sounds as if one of the aliens from The Simpsons has taken the form of a Swiss administrator – or Keir Starmer – every time he’s asked to produce a genuinely human thought about football.

You can’t help but be a bit disappointed that Michael Sheen – someone who does seem to actually get it, from his rousing Wales team talks to his portrayal of Brian Clough – took the cash for narrating FIFA’s nauseatingly whitewashed ‘Written in the Stars’ documentary of the tournament in Qatar.

That’s not to say that there weren’t similar issues with the earlier World Cups or their accompanying documentaries. FIFA’s present-day problems don’t begin and end with Infantino. Sepp Blatter was his predecessor, after all.

For example, on the official FIFA+ streaming service, you’ll find Campeones for the 1978 tournament in Argentina. The 1991-produced documentary is perfectly fine for all matters football, featuring some great footage of Mario Kempes et al, but you will find next to no framing of the wider context – namely the hosts’ military junta and the brutal dictatorship that ruled over the country at the time.

In an era when FIFA had something resembling a backbone, their original ‘Copa 78 – O Poder do Futebol’ (“Cup ’78: The Power of Football”) documentary was made by a Brazilian team in 1979 and included controversial interview subjects.

Rodolfo Galimberti, a prominent leader of the left-wing Montoneros guerrilla resistance group, accused the Argentine organising committee of deliberately reducing Brazil’s chances by tampering with the playing surface in Mar del Plata.

Funnily enough, that never made it into FIFA’s sanitised do-over. But you can still find the original version online; god bless the Internet Archive.

Honestly, this gets to the crux of it. These documentaries have never been an objective, disinterested retelling of the tournaments and the – often problematic, sometimes downright despotic – nations they were hosted in. They are commissioned by FIFA, after all.

You’ll have to look elsewhere for that, with Jonathan Wilson’s recently published ‘The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup’ a more than decent starting point.

The more recent editions might be closer to the infamously dismal ‘United Passions’ in being hilariously naked propaganda for FIFA, but we could just about stomach that – as we did when watching Lionel Messi’s Argentina and their thrilling run to World Cup glory in Qatar – if they looked and sounded as good as their efforts from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

The problem is primarily an aesthetic one. It’s like going from watching The French Connection to some algorithm-influenced Netflix slop that’s so generic it might as well have been made by AI. Any sense of artistry or daring filmmaking long gone.

Think of the newer ones like your documentary answer to The Terminator franchise; ignore everything from the last 20 years, but don’t let the diminishing returns spoil the genuine gold that came before.

Fortunately, unlike The Terminator, you’ve got more than two great films to gorge on.

Above, we waxed lyrical about Mexico ’86, the romantic’s choice, but we could just as easily have gushed a few hundred words about any one of them up to 2006. Sean Connery doing Spain ’82! Pierce Brosnan doing Germany ’06! Sadly there’s no Roger Moore on France ’98 or Daniel Craig narrating Italia ’90, but they’re every bit as good.

The irony is that FIFA now has more resources, more footage and more ways to reach audiences than ever before. Quantity has increased dramatically; quality has not. But the old collection will always stand the test of time.